In my last two posts I’ve introduced Richard Wollheim’s account of artistic meaning in painting, and suggested that, whatever its merits (very great to my mind), it cannot be thought to exhaust the kinds of distinctively artistic meaning found in the visual arts generally. So in this post I’ll sketch an alternative, the account of artistic meaning offered by the philosopher Michael Podro in the late 1990s in his book Depiction, with some supplemental elaborations given by the philosopher Patrick Maynard a few years later. In the rest of the book I’ll adopt this latter account and treat Wollheim’s account as something of a special case of Podro’s more general account. I’ll argue that Podro’s conceptual framework, with further qualifications and supplementations, can provide a unified account of artistic meaning in the visual arts, including such prominent kinds of visual art as decoration and the performative use of visual props, such as masks.
Both Wollheim’s and Podro’s accounts can plausibly be seen as originating in critical responses to a particular claim in the great post-World War II monument in art history, E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion. As construed by Wollheim, one part of Gombrich’s large argument in that book was an assertion about the basic nature of depictive vision, that is, the visual perception of pictures qua pictures of something. Gombrich insisted that the viewer of a picture can either be aware of what is depicted (say, a lion), or of the physical surface or support of the depiction (say, a piece of paper with linear pencil marks), but not both simultaneously. Gombrich thereby assimilates depictive seeing to something like seeing the famous duck-rabbit drawing: however familiar the drawing, one either sees a duck or a rabbit, but not both at the same time.
In introducing the concept of ‘seeing-in’, Wollheim asserted the opposite, that is, that in ordinary depictive vision the viewer is simultaneously aware of both the depicted figure and the physical, material support. Accordingly, the perception of depictions could not be captured with the duck-rabbit diagram as a kind of ‘seeing-as’, where the viewer sees the diagram now as one thing, now as another. As Wollheim put it: “Seeing-in permits unlimited simultaneous attention to what is seen and to the features of the medium. Seeing-as does not.” (Wollheim (1980), p. 212) This counter-assertion was the germ of Wollheim’s account of representational seeing as ‘seeing-in’; in standard cases of depictive seeing the viewer’s experience has the phenomenological character of ‘seeing-something-in-something’, e. g. seeing a lion in a marked surface. The kinds of artistic meaning that Wollheim surveyed in Painting as an Art presuppose and build upon this fundamental character of depictive seeing as seeing-in, as aspects of a picture’s medium—physical support and material marks—are recruited into the artistic meaning of the picture as a whole. In some of his most elaborated and insightful analyses, Wollheim argued that artistic paintings in many cases metaphorized their surfaces and the character of their marks, especially in terms of treating the material surface and/or the marks as (metaphorically) corporeal, and thereby contributed to the artistic meanings of the painting.
An especially powerful instance of this is the account of Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas, wherein, so Wollheim claims, the material surface of the painting is conceptualized as a kind of skin, and trailing deposits of paint as blood.
Podro accepted Wollheim’s counter-claim, but he did not treat seeing-in as the basis of artistic meaning in visual art. Something of Podro’s mature account can be seen already in his first book, The Manifold of Perception, a study of the German tradition of accounts of visual perception in the arts from Kant through Adolf Hildebrand in the late 19th century. In discussing Hildebrand’s account of sculptural relief, Podro notes that it “is surely characteristic of our experience not only of classical relief but of painting that we do distinguish between those paintings on the one hand in which we take the surface or medium for granted—so that we may be said to look through the surface to the subject represented—and those paintings on the other where we have the kind of involvement which we recognize as characteristic of art.” (Podro (1972), p. 87) Podro agrees with Wollheim in thinking that artistic painting is distinguished from everyday painting in that the former bore richer kinds of meaningfulness, and further follows Wollheim in thinking that one major way in which an artist achieves this richness is by building up analogies between what is represented and the medium in and through which the figure is represented (see Wollheim (1980), p. 224 and Podro (1998) p. 6) achieved. But instead of starting from the perceptual capacity of seeing-in as basic to depictive representation, Podro starts the notion of visual recognition: “At the core of depiction is the recognition of its subject” (p. 5). Podro then deviates from Wollheim in two ways: First, he generalizes the point about recruiting features of the medium into artistic meaning into a claim about any and all aspects of artistic meaning that are not inherently bound to the recognition of the subject. Anything besides sheer recognition of the subject that the artist incorporates into the artistic meaning of the work is treated as an instance of complicating the recognition. Second, he says that such recruitment is an instance of the use of the imagination.
So whereas Wollheim had treated the imagination as the source of important though partial kinds of artistic meaningfulness, Podro treats it as so to speak the perceptual organ of artistic meaning per se. Podro’s central claim is that artistic meaning should be grasped as what he calls ‘sustaining recognition’, and that recognition is ‘sustained’, that is not simply completed in the recognition that ‘this is an X’, is through the employment of the imagination. Podro will say that in artistic depiction we “imagine what we recognize in it” (ibid). One might think that this is a mere terminological change or re-description. In my next post I’ll argue that on the contrary it is the conceptual breakthrough that allows Wollheim’s central points to become part of a general account of artistic meaning in the visual arts.
Note: Another personal anecdote: When I publicly interviewed Wollheim in 2002, he asserted that artistic meaning in painting begins with the Renaissance Venetians’ leaving the brush stroke visible, producing ‘a certain ruffling of the surface’. Dumbstruck, I could only manage to ask “Well, then what was Giotto doing, if not painting as an art?” It didn’t seem to me that I got an answer.
References:
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Ilusion (1960)
Michael Podro, The Manifold in Perception (1972)
-----Depiction (1998)
Richard Wollheim, ‘Seeing-as, seeing-in’, in Art and its Objects (1980)
-----Painting as an Art (1987)